Mississippi State closed the book on a historic season with an ugly loss in a prominent bowl game.

Not only will the Bulldogs 49-34 loss to Georgia Tech in the Orange Bowl send them into the offseason with a bad taste in their mouths, but it could hurt them on the recruiting front as well.

As it stands on Jan. 6, Mississippi State claims the No. 18 recruiting class in the nation according to 247Sports industry rankings. They’re received five signed letters of intent, including three from four-star prospects, and have 21 other commitments including three more four-star recruits.

The Bulldogs are poised to post their first top 20 recruiting class in the Dan Mullen era, and they need to make a splash on the recruiting front upon losing one of the largest senior classes in the SEC.

But the way they ended the season, especially in the bowl game, might have changed the national perception of the program back to what it once was — a modest program in a loaded division that few top prospects want any part of.

Mississippi State lost three of its last four games in 2014, all to schools ranked in the top 20 in the national polls and all on big stages with large national audiences tuning in. Those losses make it easy to forget the Bulldogs three straight wins over top 10 teams early in the season (LSU, Texas A&M and Auburn), and the combined 15 losses those three teams incurred diminishes the achievement to a certain extent.

Recruits across the nation won’t see MSU’s late-season struggles as the result of a difficult stretch to end the season. They’ll see those losses as a regression back to the mean, a return to mediocrity if you will.

And when Mississippi State was falling apart in the second half of its loss to Georgia Tech on New Year’s Eve, there were no other games to distract recruits from taking in the rout. That’s how they’ll remember Mississippi State going forward, and not for its 9-0 start or its 10-win regular season.

The Bulldogs might not feel the effects of the bowl loss in this year’s recruiting class, but they might in future classes down the line. They’ll lose a great number of starters this offseason, and if Dak Prescott leaves school early for the NFL the Dawgs stand to regress in 2015.

Should that be the case, the Bulldogs will really wish they’d capitalized on their opportunities against Alabama, Ole Miss and Georgia Tech. When established schools have a “down year,” they point to past accomplishments and justify the present struggles as “growing pains.” There’s promise that a young team can easily build itself back to prominence, and there’s more patience among those close to the program.

But for Mississippi State, there are no past accomplishments to point to. Before this season, MSU had only won 10 games one other time in 70 years, and it hadn’t beaten a single ranked team in nearly five. If a young Bulldogs team struggles in 2015, it won’t be justified through “growing pains;” instead, it will be seen as the turning of the page from the flash in the pan that was 2014.

The program will not have the allure it once had when it maintained a No. 1 ranking earlier in the season. It could fall off many a prominent recruit’s radar as quickly as it emerged, and it could go back to dreaming of top 20 recruiting classes rather than collecting them.

There’s no reason to expect this year’s impressive class will fall apart before National Signing Day next month, but we won’t be able to honestly evaluate the 2015 class for at least another two years. Mississippi State might lose 10 games or more in that time, falling behind many of the SEC’s traditional powers on the recruiting trail as a result.

Time will tell if recruits are able to look past the perception and give Mullen and MSU an honest look, but for now it appears any chance MSU had of establishing itself as a threat in the West for years to come ended with the loss to Georgia Tech.

Appearing in the Orange Bowl was a huge step forward for Mississippi State, but the result of the game might have marked a huge step back.